The hostilities leaked back into the public eye Monday, when website Shady Pines reported that Oates, a former regular guest on Bell's popular UFO-oriented talk-radio program, had repudiated a cease-fire agreement he had signed only a few weeks earlier and was now claiming that Bell had "badgered" him into signing the settlement in the first place. Documents posted on the site state that Oates now seeks a restraining order against Bell to prevent such harassment in the future.

Hours later, Bell, who has filed a $60 million slander lawsuit against Oates and another one-time guest, Robert A.M. Stephens, was back on the alert, reviving the "lawsuits" section of his own online site in order to alert his fans that claims the settlement was reached through coercion are "inaccurate."

Bell had previously taken the material off the web to honor the terms of the agreement. Although he did not republish all of the courtroom material he had originally displayed -- "in the continued spirit of the (hopefully upheld) settlement agreement contract" -- he did authorize the republication of several sworn affidavits from Oates' former friends and business associates supporting Bell's case.

Bell's lawyers, meanwhile, said they had received no indication that the agreement had been broken. Since one of the terms of the arrangement was to keep the other details private, they refused to discuss the subject further.

Oates himself remained officially silent on the matter -- his own Web sites have not been updated in over a year -- and his legal firm could not be reached for comment. However, the UFO-oriented corners of the Internet were aglow with missives purportedly from him or, more accurately, members of his legal team.

Shady Pines, which is best known for hosting documents supporting Stephens' heterodox and anti-Bell version of UFO research, has since received at least two e-mail notes originating from Oates' e-mail address. However, the main body of each message is signed by the paralegal assistant of Oates' lawyer. Direct contribution from Oates himself seems limited to perfunctory approval -- "post if you wish" or "to whom it may concern."

According to the paralegal assistant, the settlement would have "financially destroyed" Oates, forcing him to perjure himself against Stephens on Bell's behalf while leaving him liable to deportation to his native Australia.

Perhaps significantly, she took special care to absolve her firm of rumors they had forced Oates to rescind the settlement.

"Additionally, it is also misrepresented that Oates' lawyers persuaded David to rescind his signature," the e-mail states. "This is a lie. Oates regretted it (the settlement) immediately, before his lawyer knew. Oates signed only after inhuman harassment and badgering on the part of Bell and his mindless clones."

To prevent such harassment in the future, the documents archived on Shady Pines indicate that Oates now seeks a restraining order against Bell and his lawyer.

The split between the two stars of the paranormal universe -- Bell's syndicated "Coast to Coast" melange of UFOs, conspiracy and millennial rumbling appears on more than 400 radio stations, while Oates' own radio show and trademark "Reverse Speech" voice analysis technique have won him a cadre of dedicated fans -- began in March 1998, when Oates trained his rewinding sights on Bell regular Ed Dames.

Bell apparently took offense at Oates' insistence on analyzing ambiguous backward messages, or "metaphors," contained in the words of Dames, a self-proclaimed "remote viewer," or clairvoyant. As a result, he never invited the master of Reverse Speech back on his show.

Subsequently, Oates began to criticize Bell on the radio program "Sightings" and elsewhere, claiming among other things that Bell was covering up some apparently sinister element in Dames' nature or background that Reverse Speech had inadvertently uncovered. According to Jeff Rense, host of "Sightings," the motivation was apparently revenge.

"Mr. Oates told me on repeated occasions that he was very upset with Bell for refusing to have him back on the Art Bell radio show," Rense wrote in a courtroom affidavit. "At one point, Mr. Oates told me that Bell had ruined Oates' career and that Oates was out to get Bell."

Bell, for his part, claims to have tried to ignore the entire situation, "hoping maybe it would go away."

Meanwhile, Oates got his own radio program where, like Bell, he held court in a crowd of UFO enthusiasts, contactees, channelers and conspiracy buffs. Last April, one of his guests was fellow Bell exile Robert A.M. Stephens, who had been banned from the Art Bell show for picking a fight with regular guest and Mars Face buff Richard Hoagland.

Stephens used his time on Oates' program to claim that Bell was involved in questionable "militia" activities and had served jail time in the late 1970s for creating and marketing pornographic materials.

Bell filed his $60 million lawsuit against both Stephens and Oates six weeks later, claiming that the two men had "agreed to join together in an effort to harm Bell's public reputation and injure him personally . . . a blatant attempt to unlawfully attack and injure Bell."

As a neutral party to the conflict, Rense managed to remain on speaking terms with both Oates and Bell, serving as go-between throughout the spring. In fact, Oates actually signed a written retraction sent him by Bell through Rense in April, although this was later rescinded, apparently on orders of Oates' lawyer. As Rense said Oates told him, "my attorney won't let me (back down); he won't do anything I tell him."

According to Rense, the settlement agreement that Oates eventually signed -- and has now allegedly rescinded -- only called for "a dismissal of claims by both parties, but without a payment of money by either side." He told Oates to sign it "without hesitation."

For his part, Stephens has also remained officially incommunicado, recuperating from what Shady Pines called "a very rare virus that very little is known about." The last notice on the man's condition available on the Web site was on August 14, when he was reportedly in the hospital awaiting a defibrillator implant.

His public comments on the lawsuit have been scattered and largely derisive, as he reportedly views the legal pressure as a "frivolous" attempt to censor his dissent from the UFOlogical mainstream -- notably his dispute with Richard Hoagland, whom Stephens, an artist and computer-imaging consultant, called Bell's "accomplice in lies macabre" last year.

"If you make fun of the UFOers, they go ballistic," he has told local Montana reporters. "It's a religion that tolerates no sense of humor."

Meanwhile, he has never signed any retraction or settlement agreement, and "categorically denies" all charges brought against him.

Although Bell stated in his lawsuit that Shady Pines is Stephens' creation, the site itself bristles at the connection, and says only that it contains Stephens content.